February 26, 2012

Week of Gaming #73 - 02/26/12

A few good sessions of Batman: Arkham City have put that game back on top of my list this week, and an obsession with earning my new avatar in Starcraft 2 has made it a close second. But the real winners are everything else I've been checking out on my iPad this week...

Games of note:

1 - Batman: Arkham City

2 - Stacraft 2

3 - iPad puzzle games!

iPad puzzle games!

Well, obviously Sun Stones has given me a professional interest in puzzle games on iOS, and I've recently discovered the amazing blog http://gottasolveit.blogspot.com which reviews iOS and physical puzzle games. Why such an odd pairing? Because it's written by the man responsible for covering physical puzzles for Games Magazine, and he has an iPhone! Sounds like a recipie for success to me.

Anyway, Tom Cutrofello has put together a really astoundingly complete list of puzzle games on the site, including lists of top suggestions. I've been playing 40 or more of them the past few days. Tom really seems to appreciate the underlying mechanics, so many of these are pretty bare-bones affairs, but all of them have some interesting mathematical quality. Here are a few of the ones I'm especially enjoying:

Think Ahead - this is an awesome 2player puzzler. Fighting the AI is pretty bland, unfortunately.

Conztellation - it's a spaceship-based triangle-building game!

Starcraft 2

I really want to earn the avatar for completing all of the Hard AI custom challenges - the biggest component of which is to defeat 100 even-matched Hard AI opponents. I've been playing them as random, to help improve my progress towards the medium AI achievements as well... (interestingly, you need 100 Terran, 100 Zerg, 100 Protoss, and 100 Random games for Medium - but each random game counts double-duty for its specific race as well. Thus playing random games on hard gives me triple-credit.)

I'm at a point now where hard AI is just a cakewalk. Just do a decent job with one base economy, and build a defensive force near your ramp. Wait for the opponent to come with an attack around 7-9 minutes, then counter-attack. Win. Repeat. Will this practice improve my vs. human games? Or will it make me less robust?

Batman: Arkham City

I'm just over 300 riddler trophies collected, and I finally redeemed my free Robin & Catwoman DLC. If only the combat challenges would unlock a bit faster...

Comments

It will definitely help vs Human games, because you think how to improve, also it is not far from laddering, because even if you still playing vs Human, metagame on ladder games not so big as it is with your training partners or on tournaments where you know your opponent.